In her new book Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, Joan C. Williams has a message for her fellow liberals: if you don’t care about the problems facing working-class Americans and don’t strive to understand their point of view on things, you won’t win elections.
“My message to liberals is that we will lose elections,” Williams says, “or scrape by so narrowly we can’t implement progressive changes, unless we can secure more votes from these middle-status voters in routine jobs feeling left behind. So if you care about climate change or abortion rights or defending democracy, you need to care about these lower-middle-class voters.”
Williams is a distinguished professor of law at the University of California, San Francisco, and the founding director of the Equality Action Center. Outclassed is a compelling and insightful read, even if some of its generalizations are off the mark.
According to Williams, “The Democratic Party over the past few decades has gotten into the position of appearing to oppose and scorn widely cherished institutions — conventional nuclear family, religion, patriotism, capitalism, wealth, norms of masculinity and femininity, then saying ‘vote for me.’”
The Left’s rejection of these values “opens up the door to far-right populism … a one-trick pony [whose] only move is to take economic anger and direct it away from the Merchant Right, toward people of color and the Brahmin Left.” The Merchant Right are conservatives who worship the market above all else, even the workers who fill their factory floors. The Brahmin Left are people, such as Ezra Klein, who ignore conservative working-class values and have never worked a day in their lives.
What Williams says in Outclassed is that the Left has to respect the values of the Right more. In doing so, it will win over voters, resulting in a better deal for workers, as the Left appreciates them more than the Right.
As someone who works a lot of manual labor jobs, this argument makes sense — even if liberals are too wedded to their nutty ideology to change. I recently was considering a move to a Southern state from my home in Washington, D.C., but was shocked when I began to notice how much lower the minimum wage is in conservative states such as Virginia and South Carolina. I’m a Catholic conservative who loves America, doesn’t get transgenderism, and opposes high taxes. But $7.25 an hour? Are you kidding? When I raise this matter with conservatives, I get a lot of blank stares.
Like most people on the Left, Williams oversells the boogeyman of the “Far Right.” This hungry, multiheaded beast is apparently everywhere, the Confederate flag at the ready, just itching to put the wife in the kitchen and go hunt some immigrants. I can only ask Williams what I often ask conservative pundits — what was the last working-class job you held? Mine was a year at Amazon.
Here’s the shocker: in 2025, working-class people of all races work together and get along. I’ve worked in bakeries, home improvement stores, and as a home healthcare aide. America is far ahead of the academics and journalists when it comes to fighting racism, going about our jobs, and not obsessing over it.
What bothers us a lot more is economics, and Williams has a point about conservatives not understanding the idea of treating working people better. The Right thinks that somehow translates into socialism when it’s more a matter of basic decency. I’ve worked in stores that were union and nonunion, and the difference is stark. The union stores were safer, paid better, and the workers were generally happier. Many of them were also opposed to the Left’s bizarre cultural obsessions with sex and socialism.
In other words, I’m right at the center of Williams’s arguments in Outclassed. While Williams thinks the Left should ease up on the cultural agenda to win more conservatives over, I believe that conservatives should concede to some of the economic arguments on the Left that make conditions better for workers. Yes, the liberal social agenda is perverse. Yet, liberal states tend to pay and treat workers better.
Williams again and again goes back to the theme of honor — how important it is and always has been for working people, often to the point where they will work themselves to death and endure bad treatment by owners. You feel pride at the end of the day when you’ve built or accomplished something, but you also need to be paid and protected.
AMERICA’S ELITES HAVE FORGOTTEN WHAT A WORKING WEEK IS
“It is progressive dogma that any negative reference to welfare is racist,” Williams says, “ignoring that whites are judgmental toward white as well as black welfare recipients. This doesn’t make this judgmentalism attractive, but it certainly complicates the story that this is all about racism.”
That’s a reality conservatives can cheer for. Now, if they would only get behind a minimum wage. The hardworking people I spend all day with deserve it.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
